Deployment Zone

Until November 25th Pragmatic Press is offering 40% off all their existing print and upcoming print books.  I took advantage of this and picked up a few print books, but one of the books I wanted was eBook only.  No problem, except… no Kindle.  So:

1. Jailbreak iPhone if you haven’t done so already.  Very important to change your root and mobile user passwords – root’s password by default is `alpine’ - either by installing Cydia’s Terminal application or sshing into your phone.  (Jailbreaking is a time consuming process and I feel guilty about putting it as a single step.)
1. You will need to install OpenSSH so you can copy files to the phone; you will probably also want to install Terminal.  Both of these applications are available for free within Cydia, just search for them and install.  It will take a long time for your very first ssh connection to your phone to connect as its generating encryption keys.
2. Install the free Kindle app on the iPhone from the iTunes store.
   1. The Kindle stores its books in an `eBooks’ folder buried in the `/var/mobile/Applications/…/Documents/eBooks’ where the `…’ is a GUID identifying the application.
3. SSH (preferably a client where you can copy and paste) or Terminal.
   

   find -type d /var/mobile/Applications -name 'eBooks'

   1. a. Copy the GUID, and you’ll want to end up with the path in 2.1, above, but where the `…’ is replaced by the GUID.  (On my device the GUID was 127DF7F1-9B49-423B-9FA9-77AB87775E24 but I don’t know if this is the same across devices; probably not.)
4. This is purely for convenience, mainly because I want to use WinSCP to copy files from my Windows 7 PC to my iPhone and I don’t want to remember the GUID for the Amazon application every time I want to do this.  (You can also use command line scp, but you’ll likely still want to create a symlink.) (You may also want to use `/private/var/root/Media/eBooks’ if you prefer a better organizational hierarchy.)

   ln -s /var/mobile/Applications/YOUR_GUID/Documents/eBooks \
   /private/var/root/eBooks

5. Now you can use WinSCP or scp to copy *.mobi files directly into your device’s `/private/var/root/eBooks’ directory; books you copy here will be available in the Amazon Kindle iPhone app next time you launch it.

Some Khorne Berzerkers I finished up after having them assembled and sitting in a box for over six years.  Also trying out my new camera and figuring out how to take pictures.

One of the coolest Hordes models and also one of the weakest.  I painted this a long time ago and its one of the funnest paint jobs I've done.  When I use this model its only because it looks awesome and intimidating.

Update: a much better photo.

I've had this machine, dubbed "The BEAST" to the outside world (aka my friends) since last August with literally nothing to do.  Its a monster, eight cores, HyperV with several VMs running, 8 GBs of RAM and Server 2008 64-bit.  I just wish I had some useful task to put it towards!